From the Amazon DTP Website:Dear Publishers,
We are pleased to announce the worldwide launch of DTP with support for English, French, and German languages. With this launch, authors and publishers around the world can use DTP to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers worldwide in the Kindle Store(http://www.amazon.com/kindlestore.
Additional language options with DTP will be added in the coming months.
We have made a number of other changes to our Terms and Conditions. Key highlights include:
1. We have made it easier than ever for our publishers to exercise their choice of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on Kindle store. Publishers are now able to select 'Enable or Disable DRM' option on a per-title basis during the submission process.
2. We now require that a title's list price not exceed the lowest suggested retail price or equivalent price for any physical edition of the book.
3. To be accepted in the DTP program, digital books with a file size greater than 3 megabytes up to 10 megabytes must also have a list price of at least $1.99, and digital books with a file size of 10 megabytes or greater must have a list price of at least $2.99.We are excited about launching these features and look forward to serving authors and publishers globally.
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Baby steps, but this is all good. One of the most important things here is that the DRM decision has now been handed over to the rights owner, where it belongs. As far as the pricing structure, well, some Indie authors will have a problem with this and so will some readers who want cheap content. It used to be a good Indie marketing strategy to have the cheapest content out there in order to entice more readers to take a chance, but to me $1.99 is still a steal, and 3-10 megs is still a lot for a straight text ebook. Even my largest novella comes in way under the 3 meg mark. There are a host of other changes to the DTP agreement, and most publishers will have received a note via email about them already. International bank accounts are now permitted, obviously, and they have added a pay by check option for royalties -- though like Scribd, your royalties must reach $100.00 before a check will cut versus the EFT option of $10.00 min. Now if we can just get Amazon to open Kindle to the standard ePub format as well as the mobi format then they could rise above the Nook and Sony readers. After all, that's where Kindle lost me ... I wanted a multiformat reader with wider purchasing options.
6 comments:
Another unrelated item: Smashwords update, from my blog.
"Even my largest novella comes in way under the 3 meg mark."
My novel submissions are well under 1 megabyte, but I submit in HTML. I feel really sorry for the folks who are submitting their e-books in Word format; heavy only knows how much that adds to the heft.
"Now if we can just get Amazon to open Kindle to the standard ePub format"
What you said. I'm not submitting any more e-books to Amazon till they accept to that format; it's just not worth my time to have to create two separate formats of the e-book.
Submitting in word .doc format doesn't affect things that much as long as you properly format the word doc and strip it of all the unnecessary junk. Most people don't know how to use Word properly. I submit in word .doc format and they seem to work better than the HTML for me, and mine also come in way less that 1 meg, not even close.
For me, I use the same "slightly modified" word .doc to upload to Smashwords and Kindle. All I change is the license notes, one to say Kindle Edition and one to say Smashwords. I haven't had an issue with formatting yet, and your right, who wants to reformat for each venue. What a pain. I used to HTMl but I am not a code guru and it took me longer to strip the crap out of the HTML then it does to strip a word .doc.
So Dusk, are you going to Smash your words???? Now that I have my cute little Sony reader, I am looking for stuff on Smashwords to load onto it. I've been eyeing up Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers for some time now but can't get it for my reader.
Amazon still gives me a rash. I'll stick with Smashwords, m'self.
FWIW, my book came in at 528k in Word and 845k as pdf. That's for a 66k,~250 pg story. So if you've got 10MB, you're writing Stephen King sized tomes or including pictures.
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